So, what with the beautiful weather and all, I decided to go out back and check on our Battleford apple tree, to see how it was doing. It had spent the winter buried in snow, so I figured it was alright, but I was rather surprised and dismayed to find this:

In the areas I’ve circled, you can see the damage the little bunny bastards have caused. I’d learned last year that the local rabbits like to chew the soft, tasty bits off of our trees, and so both trees had been fenced off. However, the fence in the back collapsed due to a combination of heavy snow and, shall we say, haphazard construction. The result is that, while the tree in the front yard escaped the carnage, the tree out back didn’t fare so well.

But it gets better! Lenore and I decided to take a trip to the local corner store (her on her bike, me on my feet, since some a**hole stole my bike from our front veranda), and look what we found:

Yeah, they basically massacred that tree. And they did the same to most of the other trees that populate the area behind our house. The sad thing is, I’m pretty sure those trees will die this year, as the Phloem, which is responsible for transporting nutrients from the leaves to the roots, is limited to the bark of the tree. And, unfortunately, such damage by rabbits is a common problem.